Friday, March 20, 2009

Tomorrow We Move

Sometimes in a movie, there's a scene where you know that you've made a massive mistake, and the film is going to be an unbearable waste of time. So, several minutes into Tomorrow We Move, when a character has a tearful monologue about how her deceased husband loved chicken, I knew this was going to be a long haul. At fifteen minutes, I was already sick of the characters and their annoying problems. I didn't turn the movie off though, as much as I wanted to. No, I kept watching, for you, my loyal readers.

It's French, and I think it's supposed to be a comedy. There's a scene where a man talks about an apartment, and he phrases it so he could be talking about himself! Oh, that's comedy! It's about a woman whose mother (I can't be bothered to look up their names) has moved in with her. She then meets an old man (mentioned above) who shows her the aforementioned apartment, which apparently smells bad. Then a bunch of other wacky characters show up at an apartment showing. Hijinx fail to ensue.

Honestly, the first rule of good storytelling is that people have to care about the characters, and you have to care about their problems. In this, the problems were minor, and the characters uninteresting. But the movie kept happening anyway, plodding through its dull story and apparently attempting to be funny, without actually being all that amusing.

And then, just when you think it can't get any worse, it piles on the noise. Music is playing constantly, often under the dialog. Then everyone argues and shouts or something else discordant happens. It's like the film was a challenge, like the director said "yeah, you think this thing is grating now, wait until you see what ELSE I can do!"

It's grating, and it thinks it's funny when it really isn't. You don't want to watch it, and the only reason I did was for the sake of my internet critic cred. So, are there any high points? Well, the lead actress is fairly charming in spite of the void of a character she's portraying. I can see her being very good in a better film. Oh, and I accidentally set it to speed up slightly at one point, and that made it end sooner.

Yeah, the movie isn't very good, and you shouldn't watch it. Truth be told, I shouldn't have watched it either, but I did. Oh, the trials of being an internet film critic.

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What IS Movies At Random?

Every Tuesday and Friday, this intrepid viewer watches a movie selected with a minimum amount of personal input, and tells you what he thinks of it and its place in the world of cinema. Will it be a really awful French movie about horny teenagers? Will it be an award winning epic that everyone loves? Will it be a pile of random crap that everyone in the universe forgot existed? Only the goblins in the computers at the local mail-order DVD company know for sure!